The Consequences of Caring

Search Search Search Search Menu Search Features The Triangle The Hollywood Prospectus Contributors Podcasts Video Quarterly ESPN.com ➤ Previous ‘That Was Supposed to Go In’ ➤ Next Plausible Fixes Jim Rogash/Getty Images Facebook Twitter Print Simmons The Consequences of Caring From his daughter's passion for the Cup-less Kings to his own for the aged Celtics, Bill Simmons gets a refresher course in disappointment by Bill Simmons on June 8, 2012 My daughter was crying. We were waiting for a green light on Olympic Boulevard, returning home from a Stanley Cup celebration that never happened. A depressed Kings fan pulled up to our right, glanced over and mouthed the word, “Awwwww.” He alerted his passenger, another depressed Kings fan, who leaned over to catch a glimpse. They only stared for a second or two, probably remembering the days when sports made them cry. And then the light turned green and they drove away. This happened on Wednesday night. Sports only brought my daughter to tears one other time: On a Saturday at Staples, after the Bruins had defeated her Kings while I wore a Bruins sweatshirt, donned a Boston cap and respectfully cheered for the champs. I say “respectfully” because we bought Kings tickets this season and I liked everyone sitting around us. Nothing sucks more than a visiting fan crashing your section and cheering obnoxiously for his team. That’s what every Clippers game is like. I didn’t want to be That Guy. I hate That Guy. We all hate That Guy. So I downshifted a few notches. And even though I prepared her before that Bruins game — Look, this is Daddy’s team, just like the Kings are your team, and if I ever teach you anything in life other than “stay off the pole,” “don’t date a Lakers fan” and “don’t text naked pictures of yourself under any circumstances ever,” it’s that you only have one team for every sport — she couldn’t handle it when it happened. She felt betrayed. When the Kings nearly tied the game in the final seconds, ultimately falling short, I pumped my fist and caught her glaring with one of those “You will pay” death stares. And just like that, she started crying. I remained sympathetic while being secretly delighted, like she had passed some sort of “Fledgling Sports Fan” hurdle or something. On the way home, I discreetly snapped an iPhone picture of her post-cry for a keepsake — you know, “Here’s the first time sports ever made my daughter cry” — only she caught me taking it, flipped out like a Real World roommate and scratched my right arm so hard that it bled. She didn’t talk to me for two hours. And that’s when I knew my daughter liked sports. I always assumed my kids would care … but you never know with this stuff. My son’s favorite celebrity right now? Michael Jackson. He loves Michael and werewolves, in that order, so you can only imagine how he feels about Thriller. I never, ever could have predicted this. That’s parenthood. You roll with the whims of your kids. At the same time, there had to be some trick for hooking my daughter on sports beyond the old standby of “taking her to games and seeing if she likes it.” After she turned 5, I asked a few friends with older children for tips. The same suggestion kept popping up: You can’t necessarily make them follow your team, but you can steer them away from your least favorite teams. Good advice. Even if it’s difficult to sway a Los Angeles native toward Boston teams playing 3,000 miles away — don’t rule me out, by the way — I could brainwash her to despise the Lakers (as covered in 2010’s “The Color Purple” column), any team with the words “New York” in its name, and the Lakers a second time just to be safe. After that? Her call. This seemed like a fair compromise. Really, I just wanted her to care. Of the 75 greatest moments of my life, sports were involved in at least 20 of them. (Fine, I’m totally lying. It’s probably 30. Maybe even 40.) Hopefully, she would care. Hopefully. Starting last October, the Kings became my daughter’s first favorite team. Hockey moves at a different, more frenetic pace than other live sports — it’s tailor-made for the ADD Generation, and that’s before you include fans yelling things like “HEY SMITH, YOU SUCK!” or sarcastically singing a goalie’s last name. It’s also a more personable crowd: more lifers and diehards, fewer front-runners, less corporate, just friendlier and more engaged. You always hear that hockey players are the best interviews, but you rarely hear anyone say hockey fans are the best live event fans. They are. Of the four major sports, only hockey is significantly better in person. I always thought my daughter would be a basketball fan — she loves playing hoops and even likes going to Clippers games. (She won’t attend Lakers games because “the Lakers fans are there.” Let’s just say the brainwashing worked.) Imagine my surprise when she fell for the Kings within minutes of her first game, even asking the lady next to us, “Who’s the best player?” The answer was playmaker Anze Kopitar, but only because Jonathan Quick hadn’t morphed into an octopus Jedi yet. She watched Kopi skate around for a few shifts, ultimately deciding, “I want to get his jersey!” because, as you know, little kids are the biggest front-runners on the planet. We showed up for the next period with my daughter proudly showing off her black no. 11 jersey. She was hooked. There was no going back. We spent the next six months attending Kings games. She learned about hockey on the fly, grasping “power plays” and “icing” pretty quickly but being stymied by the vagaries of the “offsides” rule. (I’m still not sure she understands it.) She loved the concept of overtime, and the fact that the word “death” is involved. She really loved shootouts. She noticed things that I haven’t noticed for years — you know, like how linesmen use the boards to hop up before a puck hits their skates, or how goalies spray water in their faces OCD-style during every single break. She hated how the fans treated Dustin Penner, their slumping left wing who couldn’t buy a break, frequently yelling out, “COME ON PENNER!” right after someone razzed him. A hierarchy developed for her: Kopitar first, then Drew Doughty (their handsome star defenseman), then Penner, then Quick. Those became her four guys. As April approached, I started prepping her for the playoffs. So there’s this thing called the Stanley Cup. It’s a big trophy that looks like a mammoth cup. You can drink out of it and hold it over your head. Everyone wants to hold it, so everyone tries harder in the playoffs. You have to beat the same team four times before they beat you four times. Then, you have to do it again. Then, you have to do it again. And if you do it a fourth time, you get the Cup. And what happens is, they hand the Cup to the captain, and he skates around and kisses it, and he hands it to a teammate, and that guy skates around, and it’s fucking awesome. Excuse me, freaking awesome. She didn’t get it. There were more than a few dumb questions like, “So if they beat the first team four times, THAT’S when they win the Cup?” Eventually, she figured it out. You know the rest. The no. 8-seeded Kings stole the first two games in Vancouver, morphed into a juggernaut and never looked back. My daughter attended all but one of their home playoff games. More than once she wondered, “Why didn’t they always try this hard?,” like she was auditioning for her own “Because It’s the Cup” commercial. The short answer: That’s hockey. Teams catch fire. It happens every year. They made the finals when she was sound asleep, thanks to an overtime goal from Penner in Phoenix. After two wins in Jersey, she did the math and realized that Wednesday night could double as Cup Night … you know, assuming they won Game 3. Which they did. The Kings scored four times, Quick notched another spectacular shutout, my daughter broke her unofficial record for “Most attempts to start a ‘Let’s Go Kings!’ chant,” and she even unearthed a semi-creative heckle for future Hall of Famer Martin Brodeur (“Hey Marty, you’re older than my grandpa!!!”). When Kopi scored their second goal on a spectacular bang-bang play that my friend Lewis (my only Kings friend) described as “some 1980s Russian Olympic hockey shit,” she totally flipped out, jumping up and down with her arms raised, high-fiving everyone in our section and even running down to pound the glass like a maniac. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen her that happy — not ever. So Wednesday’s game … man. I tried to warn her. I tried to prepare her: “Look, this is sports, you never know, you can’t just assume they’re going to win.” She wouldn’t hear it. She kept saying, “Dad, stop it, just stop. They’re going to win.” She had the whole night planned in her head, inadvertently jinxing it with questions like, “Who gets to hold the Cup first again?” and “How long will they pass it around?” She insisted on arriving 40 minutes early for warm-ups.

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